Showing posts with label aviary. Show all posts
Showing posts with label aviary. Show all posts

Sunday, February 21, 2016

Revisiting edits inside flickr :: Rotate & Crop

I had never imagine a big toe could be so painful, but a sudden attach of gout has laid me out for a couple of days and frustrated my daily photo project. Still I have my android camera phone and that’s fine to take photos. Pain killer and rest seems to be working for the toe but the long term prospect of having to give up so many of the foods I like is not so attractive. The one ray of sunshine is that coffee and complex carbs, as in nuts, are not banned and may actually be good for me.

flickr photo editHowever my attempt at using HDR camera+ to document my well appreciated “medicine” worked fine but my image was upside down when autoloaded to flickr. I could have used something like snapseed on my phone but I figured it was time to look at my options in flickr. The menu icon to work on the photo itself can be found on the individual photo display down on the right hand side. It is a stylized pen in a square box. Clicking on this brings up a simple menu and Rotate is the second item. which will bring up a simple selection screen showing three possible rotation left 90, right 90 and a full 180 inversion. Selecting the center one and clicking ok turns my photo up the right way. Very simply.flickr rotate

I needed to go into aviary, to do the crop. I had used aviary quiet a lot (and liked it) back in the days before flickr bought it and it was still a stand alone. When first first bought into flickr however it forced you to save a copy go out of flickr and save you edits as a new post. The round trip seemed a bit tedious and I stopped using it. the new version still sets up a separate window (and probably a new process) but it no longer appears like a round trip.

flickr aviary toolbar

flickr aviary crop toolThe same tools  (and fancy filters) appear to be there but the tool bar is simpler and cleaner. The cropping tools works much the same as before and you see what is being cropped out of the image. Inside the crop limits are display at the normal exposure outside that is greyed out. There are a set of common aspect rations (to match typical screen displays and print sizes, or a custom crop which I used. Unlike many other crop tools around today you can not do straightening at the same time. Such is life.

flickr aviary saveThe really big improvement now is when you click on save you have the option of replacing the existing, which is the default. or saving it as a new copy (I suppose this might be useful is you use one of those over the top filters).

The best medicine

Monday, March 22, 2010

Sometimes the Photoshop Crop Tool is all you need?

You’ve probably already seen this photo photo with the caption "no, I did not photoshop this" but gizmodo, the bible for those with the must have shiny toys, give proof that it was photoshoped. Which brings me to the point that the easiest way to improve your digital photos is via cropping and you don’t need expensive photo editing software, like photoshop, to be able to achieve that.

Picasa from google is free to download, and works on both windows & apple mac, has an easy to use and nicely visual crop tools. So does Windows Live Photogallery and  gimp. So no need to fork out a small fortune to start improving your photos.

There are also now many on-line photo editors,like Picnik, which is available to edit within flickr & facebook. A new kid on the block is Aviary, which is written in flash and thus a little slower. The cropping is part of the Phoenix image editor. However it is an amazing full featured suite for a free on-line tool. So go get creative.